John Kerry

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the following members of my staff: Scott Bunton and Dave Kass, and Gregg Rothschild of the Small Business Committee staff be granted privileges of the floor during the pendency of the tobacco legislation.

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. If I could just add to the list the Senator from Arizona just ran through, in addition to the amendments that he mentioned is also an amendment by the Senator from Rhode Island, Senator Reed, on advertising, and there is an amendment of mine, joined with a number of different colleagues on both sides of the aisle, on the issue of children. So those are two other issues. Time agreements on both of them, however, will be easily arrived at, and they should not delay us as I think most of the issues the Senator listed will be subject to time agreement. Obviously the issue of the Senator from Kentucky is more contentious, and one we need to work on over the course of the next days. And we will. With that said, we are waiting for the language from Senator Roth to add to the language from Senator Gramm. Then, hopefully, we will be able to proceed. I yield the floor.

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. I thank the Chair. I will ask unanimous consent a memorandum from the National Governors' Association, which is opposed to the Coverdell-Craig-Abraham amendment, be printed in the Record. Let me just say the Governors are deeply concerned about the financing mechanism which violates the financing that they are obviously concerned about with respect to the State expenditures on the cessation programs and other efforts with respect to the antismoking effort. I also ask unanimous consent that a statement of the national president of the Fraternal Order of Police in opposition to the Coverdell amendment be printed in the Record. I would just summarize. While they say it has a laudable goal of augmenting the ability of the Customs Service to interdict contraband coming across the border, they are deeply concerned about some antilabor schemes that strip Federal agents of their rights as employees. It also has significant language with respect to the bargaining process which would be changed without a hearing. So I ask unanimous consent that both of those memoranda be printed in the Record.

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, at this time, I send the Democratic alternative to the desk on behalf of Senator Daschle and myself.

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I thank the majority leader and the minority leader for their efforts, jointly, with the Senator from Arizona and others. I am certainly appreciative of the fact we are able to proceed forward with a couple of votes here. I think this is an important beginning of our efforts to be able to really tie down narrowly some of the most contentious issues and to be able to lay out, hopefully, an agenda for the rest of the week which would really enable us to make some progress. As the Senator from Arizona said, there really aren't that many major issues. There are some concerns Senators have and there are certainly amendments out there, some of which I know the Senator from Arizona and I are perfectly prepared to accept in the context of improving the bill, that we have before the Senate. Amendment No. 2634 to Amendment No. 2437 (Purpose: To stop illegal drugs from entering the United States, to provide additional resources to combat illegal drugs, and to establish disincentives for teenagers to use illegal drugs)

Mr. KERRY. Let me join the Senator from Arizona in simply saying that I think this was an important step forward today in a lot of respects. Neither the Senator from Arizona nor I want to sort of overly characterize what it may mean in the total yet, but it does open up the opportunity for the Senate to now move to the two remaining, most significant issues and then lay the groundwork to have, hopefully, an order of amendments for the following ones. I think it is not insignificant, therefore. The last week permitted us, frankly, to be able to work quietly behind the scenes to be able to arrive at some understandings about the structure of the tax component of the bill. And while there are two alternatives being offered, the fact is that for a week we have understood that embracing a component of the tax cut in this legislation was not inappropriate--in fact, might not only be a necessary ingredient of passing it but also an important reality for the amounts of money that are being raised in the revenues. So I think we are on a track where we have the ability tomorrow to make again some significant progress. And hopefully, with the substitutes, then we will have few remaining contentious issues and, obviously, some others that we ought to be able to arrive at a reasonable understanding about. So my hope is that those Senators who have must-do amendments will certainly inform us of those in the course of the next day or so. I thank my colleague for his cooperation. And I yield the floor.

Mr. KERRY. I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. KERRY. Have the yeas and nays been ordered?

Mr. KERRY. We reduced drug use in America by two-thirds, according to the Senator from Georgia, between 1979 and 1992. He has just made the argument for not doing what his own amendment seeks to do, because if you look at how we reduced that drug use by two-thirds between 1979 and 1992, it was because Nancy Reagan and the Reagan administration, to their credit, augmented our outreach efforts, our advertising efforts, the counteradvertising. We brought role models--sports figures and others--into the communities. We had an aggressive effort in the United States to reach into our communities and teach kids not to. That is precisely what this tobacco legislation is seeking to do with respect to cigarettes, and there is no reason in the world that you can't dovetail all of the drug efforts into that so that smoking, drugs, all of it, are dependent on the same disciplines. They are dependent on kids being raised with enough awareness of the downside and with enough self-esteem and enough structure around them to be able to make good decisions. What the Coverdell amendment does is reduce the capacity of kids to make those decisions. If we want to reduce drugs in America by two- thirds, we need to do what this tobacco legislation set out to do, and I believe we can do that by melding some of what the Senator from Georgia seeks to do. That is what the Democratic alternative seeks to do. I yield back the remainder of my time. amendment no. 2451

Mr. KERRY. Then shame on us. We ought to be prepared to do it. But don't do it at the expense of stopping kids from smoking. The Senator just made my argument. The Senator from Georgia said between 1980 and 1992 we reduced drug use in America by 30 percent. Am I correct, the Senator said that?

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, let me say to my friend, if the funding is so jeopardized, as he suggested it is, then shame on us. Then we are not serious about the drug war. Shame on us.

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, let me respond to my friend again. I do not think he absolutely answered my question. What he says is we have to have the interdiction efforts, we have to have an addition for the Coast Guard, the military because of the number of hours they are flying. I agree with that. I think we have a very serious problem growing in this country with respect to our military because of the increased OPTOUT and OPTEMPO versus the pay we are giving them, and the opportunities for time off, and so forth. That is a huge issue, and it is growing in the country. But the point is--and I make it again to my friend from Georgia--as a former prosecutor I can remember that there is a threshold level that you can stop drugs coming in, this sort of nuisance level. You can raise the price. You can always raise the cost of doing business. But no one I know in the business of law enforcement, no one I know who is serious about the drug effort believes that augmenting interdiction at the expense of the demand side is going to cure the problem. For every 300 tons of whatever that you stop, I promise you, there is an airplane that has been constructed with phony sides to it or any number of containers on ships, or any means, that the demand will bring those products. They will even manufacture them in this country. They will find a way to get them to people. The key issue is reducing the level of demand. And the demand for a cigarette that has tobacco in it is the same demand for the white rolled piece of paper that has marijuana in it-- same act, same discipline, same entryway, entry gate to drugs. Most experts in the field of treatment and demand will tell you that that is the gateway drug. So it seems to me illogical on its face to say we are going to strip down the efforts to get the demand side reduced so we can augment what was going to automatically be increased anyway, which will be increased demand, increased interdiction. And you get caught in this vicious cycle where all of our resources keep being allocated to an area that does not give you as much return as education and treatment. Again, the perks are pretty clear on that issue, that if fewer and fewer kids started in the first place with cigarettes, you would have less and less demand, and no pusher can increase the number of people to demand the drugs fast enough to make up for kids who say no. If those kids are strong enough and educated enough and well prepared enough to say no, that is the way we will solve the problem in this country, more than any other. Again, the Senator from Georgia strips away a significant portion of that. He makes them competitive. It is the wrong way to come at this. I reserve the remainder of my time.

Mr. KERRY. It is an important part of the discussion. I would ask my colleague--they are both smoking. They are both smoking a grown substance, wrapped in paper, and it requires the same process. But the same ingredients of smoking are the same impact fundamentally that require counseling, education, and knowledge to build up the sort of resistance to peer pressure. I ask my colleague, if that is the purpose of it, why would he not want an increased level of funding to guarantee that they are sort of wrapped together? Smoking marijuana and smoking cigarettes are almost one in the same. They are both a narcotic substance. They both can ultimately result in great harm to health. Therefore, you want the cessation programs, the counteradvertising, et cetera. Why would the Senator then strip that capacity away for these other objectives rather than augment those?

Mr. KERRY. Would my colleague yield for a question?

Mr. KERRY. Let me say to my friend from Georgia, if I can, I don't want to be the bogeyman with respect to his request, but the leadership has carefully scheduled this because of the expectation of Senators to be in certain places. I know the time was equally divided----

Mr. KERRY. And that is true. I want to finish the thought and then I will be happy to yield to my friend. It is true all it does is authorize it. We all know what happens when the appropriators ultimately get those pressures put in front of them, and you have Department of Defense, Coast Guard or other kinds of antidrug efforts competing against something that we have never done before in America, which is sufficiently empower our antismoking efforts, sufficiently try at that early entry level to keep kids from being hooked. I respectfully suggest to my colleague, this is well intentioned, and I know he is sincere in his passion about wanting to stop drugs and is caring about this, and I agree with him completely that the efforts to date are insufficient. No question about it. But I also believe very strongly that we ought to approach this in a commonsense way. I yield to my friend for a question without losing my right to finish my time.

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, let me summarize, if I may, what the Democrat alternative, the amendment which Senator Daschle has submitted, seeks to accomplish here. First of all, the alternative antidrug amendment does not jeopardize the funding for public health. I think this is critical to understand. The Coverdell amendment will take more than 50 percent of the public health money and strip that away so as to deny the capacity of the tobacco legislation to accomplish the cessation programs, the State assistance programs, the counteradvertising and other efforts, in order to reduce the number of kids smoking. What we seek to achieve in the Daschle alternative is we remove the section in the Coverdell amendment that would have eliminated the floors for funding of public health programs from the tobacco trust fund, which would have also diverted that money for other purposes. Second, we include tough money-laundering provisions that provide critical assistance to State and Federal law enforcement in order to combat drug problems by enhancing the Federal prosecutors' ability to combat international money laundering and to seize the assets of drug kingpins and others who have engaged in illegal activities, which, I might add, would significantly augment our ability to fight drugs as well as provide additional economic assistance to some of the antitobacco efforts. In addition to that, we provide the States with additional funding to drug test, and we provide drug treatment for inmates. None of that is in the Coverdell approach. So it is clear, there are significant differences in how one can do a better job of fighting drugs. We believe the money-laundering provisions in the Democrat alternative are significantly stronger than in their approach. In addition, we have what we believe are significantly improved versions of some of the antidrug initiatives set forth in the Coverdell legislation without the liabilities carried in the Coverdell amendment. First of all, there are additional resources for interdiction. There is an increased budget for U.S. Customs, increased budget for the Coast Guard, and increased budget for the Department of Defense. But, instead of grabbing that, robbing Peter to pay Paul, stealing from the trust fund, so to speak, and denying us the ability to accomplish the fundamental goals of the antitobacco legislation, we seek to authorize that from the general revenues, which is really a more fair and more thoughtful way, in our judgment, to be able to try to deal with the problem of a drug war. We have significant additional measures with respect to drug-free borders. We do so without attacking some of the entities that are a critical component of the drug war: Customs agents, police, and others. We increase the civil and criminal penalties for customs violations, and we raise the number of border agents by 2003 to 15,000. In other words, 15,000 additional border agents by the year 2003. We give the Customs Service flexibility to address urgent drug interdiction needs, working with the front-line employees to identify the problems and to collaborate in finding effective solutions to those urgent needs. The Coverdell approach basically declares war on our own agents and begins to try to accomplish a certain ideological agenda with respect to labor unions that we think is inappropriate and unnecessary here. We, furthermore, provide $10 million per year out of the general revenues to States that institute voluntary drug testing for teen drivers' license applicants or crack down on drivers who use drugs. So we have a strong provision in our approach to deal with the problem of drug testing for teen drivers. In addition to that, we have a section on drug-free schools, but we do not add the poison-pill provision of school vouchers by the backdoor which would literally threaten to scuttle the entire tobacco legislation. All of us here know that no issue has been more contentious for a lot of different reasons. It is part of really what has divided the U.S. Senate so significantly and so unfortunately throughout the debate on education. There are many people on our side of the aisle--I know on both sides of the aisle--who desperately want to improve the public school system and to recognize that we have some very significant problems in the public schools of this country. But increasingly, all we talk about in the Senate are either vouchers or money. We are sort of polarized. We are locked into this gridlock of discussion where one side is fighting for vouchers so 1,000 kids may get saved in the school system and the other side winds up saying, ``We have to have more money,'' but in between all of the issues of curricula, standards, testing, finding good principals, hiring another 2 million teachers and how we are going to do that, a host of other things get lost. What the Coverdell amendment fundamentally does is take us right back to that very narrow debate where all we are going to do in response to the laudable goal of trying to take the victim of a violent crime or of a drug-related crime and move them to another school, instead of doing that within the public school structure, all of a sudden here is another voucher plan to provide the opportunity for that person to move to a parochial school, religious-based school or to a private school. If that were part of some comprehensive program to deal with all the schools of this country and the 90 percent of our children who are in public school, perhaps it might meet with less resistance on the floor of the Senate. But under the circumstances, it is a backdoor effort within the tobacco bill to try to do something that the Senate has already struggled with so significantly. Moreover, we create, as does the Coverdell legislation, the same financial incentives for States from general revenues. Unlike the Coverdell amendment, we take it from the general revenues; they take it from the tobacco trust fund. And we provide an annual report card to parents and teachers listing incidents of school violence, weapon possession or drug activity, and we also encourage the implementation of certain disciplinary policies. In addition to that, we provide $10 million to States for parental consent drug testing of children, as does the Coverdell amendment, but we do that without coercing parents into allowing that testing by denying access to extracurricular activities, such as athletics, for those who are unwilling to subject their children to such testing. We think both from a fairness and commonsense point of view that is more in keeping with the spirit of how the relationship between parent and school ought to work. Like the Coverdell amendment, we provide drug-free student loans. We restrict the loans for students convicted of drug possession. We restrict the loans for students convicted of drug trafficking, and just as the Coverdell legislation does, we resume loan eligibility on an expedited basis for those students who satisfactorily complete a program that includes drug testing. Just like the Coverdell amendment, we authorize $10 million per year in SBA demonstration grants, but unlike the Coverdell amendment, once again, we do not strip the capacity of the tobacco legislation to work. We do not take away the cessation programs or other youth activities and youth-access efforts that are contained within the tobacco legislation in an effort to restrict the access of our young people to cigarettes. I might add this is, I think, one of the most important things to remember when we reflect on what we are trying to achieve here. I used to be a prosecutor. I was the chief prosecutor and administrative officer for one of the 10 largest district attorney's offices in the Nation. I was part of the effort in the years when we created the first drug task forces and we created the first priority prosecution efforts and major violator efforts. I have tried cases that have sent people to jail for the rest of their life. I am proud of that record. I have fought hard in the Senate to continue that kind of, I hope, conscientious antidrug effort. So I don't want to be somehow viewed as less concerned than my friend here with whom I work on the Foreign Relations Committee, on our subcommittee, on the issue of drugs. I don't think we have a legitimate drug war in the United States. I have said that for a number of years. If you don't have adequate treatment, if you don't have adequate education, if you don't have adequate enforcement, if you don't have the capacity for swift and certain punishment, if you don't have the ability to put the people in jail who ought to be or sufficient capacity to keep the ones off the streets who ought to be kept off the streets, you are not serious. But you certainly are not serious if you don't have drug treatment on demand. Only about 26 or 30 percent of all drug addicts in the United States of America get treatment after 20 years of talking about this issue. That is not contained sufficiently in this legislation, and it ought to be. What we have to stop doing is these scatter-shock, helter-skelter efforts that do little Band-Aids here and little Band-Aids there and somehow pretend, ``Boy, have we done something to fix the drug war.'' We haven't. Nor is this going to do it. But, most importantly, what it is going to do is strip away the ability of the tobacco bill to do what it is intended to do, which is to get kids to stop smoking. That is the gateway drug to marijuana and ultimately to harder drugs. If we are serious about a drug plan for America, we shouldn't be trying to augment the Coast Guard or augment the Department of Defense at the expense of the kids who are at the earliest stage of their life, who we are trying to teach and give the value system and the self- esteem and the structure with which to be able to make a decision, not to pick up a cigarette. The values that allow a kid and the strength of character that comes to a kid, that brings that child to the point of not picking up a cigarette are the same values and the same foundations that help that child decide not to do the other things that peer pressure forces them toward or that modernity in American life thrusts on them. So it doesn't make sense to strip away that capacity in this bill. The Senator from Georgia will say, ``Well, it doesn't automatically do that; all it does is authorize these numbers.''

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, how much time do we have remaining?

Mr. KERRY. Just to inform Senators and others about what is happening here, we will vote on the Coverdell amendment and we will also vote on a Democratic alternative. The Democratic alternative covers many of the provisions of the Coverdell amendment with respect to drugs, beefing up our Customs enforcement, beefing up the Coast Guard, providing for capacity to be able to do a better job of drug enforcement, but it does so in a way that does not strip from the tobacco legislation the capacity to perform what we set out to perform under the health provisions. We have maintained the minimum expenditures with respect to the counteradvertising and cessation programs and thereby kept a floor of those things we hope to achieve within the original tobacco legislation. I think that is the most important distinction. In addition to that, there are a few other distinctions with respect to the needle program. There is a 1-year moratorium rather than a total stripping of that provision. In addition to that, there are a few other corrective measures with respect to testing and other aspects. Finally, I might add with respect to the vouchers--because that is, obviously, constitutionally and otherwise such a contentious issue within the Senate--the Democrat alternative provides for the capacity for any victim of a drug-related crime or violent crime within a school system to be able to be properly transferred to another school, but without the guise of creating a whole new program with respect to education that would involve both private schools, parochial schools and the kind of support structure for those schools that obviously has divided the Senate so much in other legislation. We believe it is a more temperate, reasonable approach to the issue that allows us to do the best of what is in the Coverdell proposal with respect to drugs, but also maintain the best of what is in the tobacco legislation. That is a fundamental summary, if you will, of the distinctions between the two approaches, both of which will be voted on shortly after the hour of 6 o'clock. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to add the Senator from Delaware, Senator Biden, as a cosponsor of the alternative.

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, may I have the yeas and nays on the Daschle amendment? Mr. President, I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. KERRY. So, Mr. President, the bottom line is, as I said, really whether or not we are going to try to approach this--maybe the Senator and I could agree that the goals of our amendment are indeed worthy, and he would like to wrap them into one, and we could have one vote accepting our amendment. I would like to do that. I yield the floor. Mr. COVERDELL addressed the Chair.

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I listened with interest to the Senator from Texas. Even when I wasn't on the floor, I heard some of it on the television. I must say that what fascinates me about it is that the real bait and switch is not the bait and switch that he has described. He has tried to describe that somehow because this bill defines a problem of smoking and then raises the prices on cigarettes, which is what the tobacco companies have agreed to do, and the tobacco companies have acknowledged affects the number of people who smoke; but he tries to allege the switch is that we don't like the tobacco companies, so what do we do? We turn around and hurt the victims. Now, in the next breath, at the end of his speech, the Senator says why don't we just raise the price and give it back to people. Why don't we raise the price, but give it back in tax cuts. The bait and switch is that the Senator from Texas doesn't give the money back to the people who pay it. He gives it back to a whole bunch of people, many of whom are doing much better than the people who will pay the higher cigarette taxes and are also people earning much more income, and also people who don't smoke. The Senator is willing to say in one breath that here you have these victims being hurt by raising the price of cigarettes, but his amendment doesn't help those victims--maybe a very few number of them--because he is willing to give money back under a marriage penalty rebate, which even goes back to people who aren't even hurt by the marriage penalty. Talk about bait and switch. That is the most extraordinary bait and switch. In addition to that, the Senator wants to have it both ways. The Senator from Texas comes to the floor and says, Why, these folks have presented enough evidence to allow me to find the tobacco companies guilty. So he acknowledges the evidence is that the tobacco companies have targeted young people and have willfully put a narcotic substance into the mainstream of America and helped our children get addicted to it and then lied about it; he acknowledges all of that evidence. He says that is fine; the tobacco companies are terrible, and we ought to do something about it. But what does he say we should do about it? He complains about raising the tax on the victims, but then he agrees that we ought to leave the tax in place, not give the money back to the people who he describes as victims, and somehow we ought to punish the tobacco companies. But he doesn't say how. Well, how are you going to do that? I remember a few days ago the Senator from Texas came to the floor and said, ``Why don't we have a windfall profit tax?'' Whoever heard of any tax on any company for any purpose that isn't subsequently written into their ability to make profits by passing it on to the people who buy their products? The Senator from Texas is, after all, a former economics professor. I know he understands the notion that if it costs you x amount to produce your product and you are in business to make money, you are going to sell your product to people, you are going to write in the cost of doing business to the cost of your product. So if all of a sudden we were to sort of somehow punish the tobacco companies by raising taxes on them, who in America doesn't believe the consumer isn't going to pick up the cost? Who in America doesn't believe if you want a better car with more luxurious appointments in it, are they going to give it to you? No. You are going to pay for it. If the cigarette companies are charged in whatever form you want to call it--a windfall profit, an excess, a bad behavior tax, a deception tax, or whatever you want to call it, to punish the companies, you are absolutely going to see that passed on to the consumer in a higher cost of a pack of cigarettes. But that is not what we are doing here. The Senator from Texas and those who want to kill this bill and who are working so hard with all of these carefully crafted amendments that create tough votes for people in the Senate understand there is only one reason the U.S. Senate is presented with legislation that raises the cost of a pack of cigarettes, only one reason. It is because every expert in the country--those who have spent more years studying this issue than any of us in the Senate--has told us unequivocally that if you raise the price of cigarettes, you will reduce the number of kids who smoke. That is the reason the cost of cigarettes goes up. So the Senator and others who oppose this legislation seem to be all over the place. They are willing to accept the price increase. They are crying for the victims, but they don't want to give back the money to the real victims, and at the same time, they are saying this is a big tax bill. At the same time, they are willing to live with the price increase that is the ``big tax bill,'' as long as they give it back to the certain things they think are important. So what we are seeing is the greed factor played out on the floor of the Senate in the form of a lot of ideological grab bags that are going to try to get vouchers. I mean, we are going to have a voucher program here on education taken out of the hides of kids who we are trying to stop from smoking. The bottom line is that for every day this debate goes on, as our friends try to stop this legislation in its tracks, more American children begin smoking--3,000 a day. For the period of time that we have been on the floor of the Senate debating this, 60,000 kids have started smoking, and 20,000 of those 60,000 kids will some day die early as a result of a tobacco-related disease. That is what this is about. Now, we keep hearing complaints about the amount of money that is somehow being spent. I just heard the Senator talk about $38,000 that is going to be spent per Native American on a cessation program. Well, here is another example of the kinds of distortion that we see in the debate. First of all, the amount of money that is made available under an authorization only, which has yet to conceivably be appropriated in an appropriate amount, is somewhere between $70 million and $196 million on an annual basis. Is that to go, as the Senator argued, just for cessation? The answer is no; that is not what it is for. If this were a real debate about the real issues that really deal with the facts, the Senator would note that it is--one of the critical components this bill has tried to recognize is the extraordinarily bad health status that exists on Indian reservations and within the Native American community, and it tries to deal with that by providing health care equipment, facilities, construction, repair of clinics themselves, and a whole group of inpatient and outpatient services. So the Senator from Texas may want to come to the floor and be cynical and/or sort of sarcastic about Native Americans and suggest that this bill is going to spend $38,000 per Native American to stop from smoking, but that is not what the bill says. That is not what the bill seeks to do. The bill seeks to rectify an enormous imbalance that for years has taken place in what is available in terms of health care overall, recognizing that all of that plays into any individual's ability to be able to be healthy and stop smoking and reduce other kinds of costs. We also heard the Senator talk at some length about this unfair tax burden on the average American of $1,015 that the person who smokes is going to pay in a household under, I think it was about $30,000 on an annual basis. The Senator's amendment on the marriage tax doesn't just deal with that $30,000-or-under individual. It goes up to about $50,000 and, as I said earlier, rewards people. People are actually rewarded by the marriage tax, because there are some people, depending on how much money they earn and what their individual incomes are, who come out better under the current marriage structure in the Tax Code, not worse. They get rewarded, too, under the approach of the Senator from Texas. But far more importantly, the reality is that there are only four areas where funding is allocated in this legislation: Public health, farmers, research, and the States. Forty percent of the money that is raised in this legislation goes back to the States directly. That very conservative fundamental has been one of the things that the Republicans have fought for for years. It is called a block grant. There is a block grant of 40 percent of the money. It is interesting that the Senator from Texas and the Senator from Georgia don't take money out of the block grant. They do not take money out of the farmers. They don't take money out of research. They only go to the public health components of this bill and cut that by one-half or more. Here, it is actually considerably more. This is the funding distribution under the public health account. Under the public health account, which would fund cessation programs, counteradvertising, prevention and education, enforcement and learning, antismuggling and Indian health, they would actually take, I believe, 82 percent. That would be cut under this approach in order to go into exclusively the so-called drug war. Mr. President, if this were a fair-minded effort to try to deal with the problems of this legislation, you might want to try to approach this in a fairer distribution of how you are cutting the funds or how you want to fund the drug war. Some of the efforts the Senator from Georgia wants to make in funding I agree with completely. For years, I have said we don't have a real drug war in America and there is a lot more we could do. But to do it at the expense of those proven efforts that will reduce kids picking up the gateway drug, which is nicotine-- tobacco--doesn't make sense. It would be far fairer--if we are going to talk about all the money that is being raised and all the money that is being spent in this legislation, then why not grab back some of the money from the farmers, or from the research, or from the States? I think the answer to that is fairly obvious as to why it isn't happening. It describes the politics of precisely where we find ourselves today. Mr. President, we keep coming back to the reality. The Senator talks about the victims and the $1,015 they spend. Nobody is forcing them to do that. One should have a little sympathy, I suppose, because the tobacco companies so adroitly and intensely worked to get them addicted when they were young kids, recognizing that 86 percent of the adults in America who today smoke and are addicted began smoking as children. We ought to probably feel something about the compulsion that sends them to buy those cigarettes. But if, in fact, raising the price will reduce even some of them smoking, as the tobacco companies have acknowledged--the R.J. Reynolds memoranda, the Philip Morris memoranda, all document that adults were reduced in smoking by the price increases of the 1980s. So it stands to reason that they would be reduced in their smoking levels by this price increase in the late 1990s. But their price increase in the 1990s would be accompanied by very significant efforts to train professionals, to educate children, to reach into our schools, and create a climate within which the entire attitude about smoking and drugs and health will change. I would suggest respectfully to the Senator from Georgia that nothing would help our antidrug efforts more than some of the value-building, character-building efforts that are part of the counseling and cessation programs that build sufficient self-esteem and awareness among our young people that they will decide not to smoke. Quite clearly, if you have built up the courage and the capacity to say you are going to refuse a cigarette, you are most likely building the foundation to be the kind of person who can also say no to marijuana, which is a form of cigarette. So I think there is a real contradiction in what is happening here--that, unfortunately, to strip away the ability to be able to pursue these proven efforts is significant. In addition to that, one of the things that the Senator from Texas and others vilify so much is the category under counteradvertising. Mr. President, a number of tobacco industry documents make it clear how much the industry targeted young kids as young as 13 years old. While the Senator says, ``I accept the notion that the tobacco companies are evil for having done this and they would be found guilty for doing it,'' the fact is that it takes a certain counteradvertising effort, which is very expensive to counter, to contradict, and undo that targeting process. You can't just acknowledge it and walk away from it. You can't just say, ``I accept. Let's find them guilty, but we are going to give them probation or even less than that.'' The question is, Are you going to do something about undoing the consequences of it? The fact is that at present there is no national antitobacco public education campaign that counters the protobacco imagery that has been presented to both adults and children by the tobacco companies. Very few States have the resources to be able to undertake the kind of long-term, sustained effort necessary, I think Nancy Reagan proved beyond any doubt whatsoever in her steadfast and, frankly, significant campaign in the 1980s on the ``Just Say No'' Program. I join with my colleague in saying that I think there has been a retrenchment from that. I think we have gone backwards. I think the administration has dropped the ball to some degree in its efforts to help counter nationally the kind of efforts we want. ``Just Say No'' had a profound impact on at least casual use in this country, and we saw the figures go down. Why on Earth then, given that record, would we want to turn away from an effort to have the counter media effort here and have antitobacco advertisements? The 1994 Surgeon General's report indicates that the mass media are particularly appropriate channels for tobacco education among young people who are heavily exposed to and often greatly interested in the media. Several States, my own among them-- Massachusetts, California, and Arizona--have developed programs that are particularly effective. They work. We have seen a reduction in smoking as a consequence of those efforts. But we have learned that they have to be sustained and they need to be of even greater impact. That means creating this national strategy and having the funding to do it. So that is in here. That is one of the efforts that is being wiped out by the current proposal as well as by most of the criticisms that we have heard. And the cessation programs themselves--it is just like the debate I remember we had on the crime bill. People came to the floor of the Senate, and there was such scorn and derision about midnight basketball, and such scorn and derision about some of these programs that take place in the boys and girls clubs, or the YMCA or the YWCA. People were able to say those are somehow tax-and-spend programs. But what we have learned is that they really are the lifeline for a lot of kids in this country who have no parents at home, whose school doors shut at 2 o'clock in the afternoon, and who are, according to the Carnegie Foundation report some 7 years ago, most likely to get into trouble either with an unwanted teenage pregnancy or with some problem with drugs, introduced on the street in the afternoons when there is no adult supervision or structure in their lives. That is a proven fact all across this country. Talk to the president of the Boys and Girls Club. Talk to any of the people who dedicate their lifetimes trying to take care of kids who are stranded, alone, without sufficient parental support. Those people will tell you it makes a difference to have an adult role model, to have adult supervision, to have structure in their lives. I recently went to a middle school in Charlestown, in Boston, and talked to a lot of kids in the middle school aged 10 to 14 years old. I was dumbstruck to learn that more than 15 percent of those kids aged 10 to 14 were going home in the afternoon, at 2 o'clock, to households that had no adult in them for 4 to 5 hours, for the rest of the day. That is the kind of program that now meets with derision on the floor of the Senate, where, specifically targeted with respect to children, we would have the ability to reduce these kids' exposure to a lot of the vicissitudes of life, not the least of which would be smoking and/ or drug dealing and other kinds of problems that arise in the course of the day, unsupervised. We believe what the Surgeon General and other experts have suggested, which is that there are some 48 million Americans out there who currently smoke and want to quit, who would like to quit, and they spend billions of dollars every year on patches, on nicotine alternatives, on chewing gums, on counseling, on hypnosis, and on all kinds of other efforts just to quit smoking. But one of the most successful ways to quit smoking is to help kids never start. In Massachusetts, we have a program underway. We wish we could reach more kids. If we pass this legislation, we could reach more kids. But right now, limited as it is, we have been able to reach about a million kids in the State. We have been able to reduce smoking by 30 percent. That is a very significant level. That saves lives, saves money, and ultimately provides a much healthier country. So that is the choice here. My hope is that a little bit more common sense and a little less effort to stop this legislation in its tracks would guide some of the amending process we are going through. I will join my colleagues and say I think there is a lot of money here. I think some of it might, indeed, be better spent. There are ways we could constructively arrive at that. But if all we are going to do is come to the floor and fight about these amendments that carve out and carve out, with a whole lot of issues involved in them that have already proven very tricky and very contentious and very divisive on the Senate floor in previous incarnations, if we keep revisiting them, one can only interpret that, unfortunately, as an effort to either derail or slow down or stop the fundamental legislation we are trying to achieve ourselves. There is a simple bottom line here. You cannot argue this every single way--certainly, I suppose you can, and be inconsistent. That never bothered some people around here. But it seems to me if we are going to try to achieve a significant piece of legislation that will affect kids, you can't accept one notion that you ought to raise the price and then cut away the capacity to put into place the significant cessation, counteradvertising, and other kinds of efforts that would most impact the level of teenage smoking, which is what this legislation is all about. I yield the floor.

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I regret enormously not just the amendment of the Senator from Georgia, which I know is well-intentioned, and I know his efforts on narcotics are sincere, but the entire panoply of amendments that are coming forward on the Republican side are--at least in my judgment, and I think in the judgment of many other Senators-- calculated not to fundamentally improve the bill but to kill this bill. And there are provisions in here which have very little to do with drug fighting--a voucher provision to allow any Federal education funds to pay the tuition of victims for a religious school or for a private school. Boy, there is one we have spent a lot of time on under the banner of education in the U.S. Senate, which we know to be fundamentally controversial in the Senate. That is here in this bill for the purpose of reducing the number of kids smoking. What really disturbs me about it--and I think I have been involved in the drug fight as long as anybody in the Senate, since I first came here. I led the effort to try to expose what was happening with our loose borders during all of the efforts to fund the Contras, the narcotics that were flowing through Central America. I have led efforts to put 100,000 cops on the streets of America. We now have that happening. Everybody who fought against it was the first to go out and campaign in their districts, saluting the virtues of community policing. Senator Biden and others helped design and fight the 1986 and 1988 drug bills that we passed. There have been many efforts here. There is a sincere effort in the Senate to try to deal with drugs. But to suggest that we now ought to make the drug effort competitive with the drug effort is rather remarkable to me. What do I mean by that? Well, to stop kids from smoking is part of the drug effort. There isn't anybody who doesn't say that smoking isn't sort of the gateway to marijuana and other drugs, and marijuana a gateway to cocaine, and so forth. If you treat--as we want to in this legislation--tobacco as the addictive substance that it is, that kills people, and recognize that this legislation seeks to give broad authority to the FDA in order to be able to regulate tobacco, then the question ought to be asked: Why are we setting it up so that we have this competition between the effort to stop kids from smoking and the effort to fight drugs? Let's go to the violent crime trust fund. Let's go to a host of other arenas and do some of the things that the Senator from Georgia is talking about. But that is not really what is going on here. What is really going on here is the piling on of amendments that are calculated to kill the bill to stop kids from smoking. What is going on here is a group of people who are doing the bidding of the billions of dollars that are being spent on all of the advertising in the country, to somehow suggest to people that this bill is overweighted or that this bill is a tax bill--all the things that this bill is not. The tobacco companies agreed to raise the price of cigarettes. The tobacco companies are settling in State after State; they are agreeing, and they agreed originally in the national settlement, that the price of cigarettes ought to be raised. The tobacco companies agreed to do that. But the great fear-mongering that is going on, to the tune of millions of dollars being spent on all of these radio advertisements and television advertisements around the country, is to try to scare the American people, because people want to help the tobacco companies and do the bidding of the tobacco companies. The tobacco companies contribute an awful lot of money to campaigns. The tobacco companies are a powerful lobby in this country, and the tobacco companies are working their will hard to try to convince people that this bill is somehow against the public interest. What is against the public interest, Mr. President, is an effort to stall this bill in the U.S. Senate. What is against the public interest is a willingness to somehow see this bill die and forget about the fact that 400,000 of our fellow citizens die every year as a result of smoking. The cost to America of smoking is far, far greater than any cost in this bill. I heard the majority leader say over the weekend that this bill is going to die under the weight of amendments. Well, they are not Democrat amendments, they are Republican amendments--amendment after amendment--that are coming, trying to weigh this bill down. Everybody knows that some of the amendments that may have passed are going to be fixed in conference--if we can ever have a conference. Everyone understands that if this bill is given an opportunity to breathe, if it goes out of the Senate and ultimately the House passes a bill, there is going to be a very significant negotiation and a very significant rewrite of whatever is to leave the U.S. Senate. The effort here is to prevent something from leaving the U.S. Senate, and it is to prevent it from leaving the Senate by doing everything except paying attention to kids who are smoking. I have heard Republicans come to the floor and criticize the amount of money that is in this bill and the pot that is being used in order to stop kids from smoking. They say, isn't it terrible, here is this big pot of money, and all the Democrats want to do is spend it on some program. Well, the program happens to be counteradvertising to stop kids from smoking; it happens to be a cessation program, proven to work, which involves young people directly in the effort to try to make better choices other than smoking. What do they want to do? They want to come and spend the money on something that has nothing to do with trying to stop kids from smoking--nothing at all. Their alternative is to fix the marriage penalty. Many of us on this side of the aisle want to fix that, Mr. President. The question is, What is an appropriate amount of money to take out of this bill, and what is the impact on a whole lot of other things that matter? The funding of this bill that the Coverdell amendment would strip away reaches 5 million smokers who would receive cessation services. And 90 percent of young people, age 12 to 17--more than 20 million people-- would be exposed to effective counteradvertising that would discourage them from taking up cigarette smoking. And 50 million children would take part in school-based prevention programs, and all 50 States would implement comprehensive State-based prevention programs in order to stop underage smoking and support laws that prohibit the sale of tobacco products to minors and develop culturally sensitive preventive programs. All of those would be threatened if the Coverdell amendment passed. They would be threatened because the Coverdell amendment wants to take more than half of the money allocated to those efforts and put it into the drug war, the Coast Guard, and into vouchers, into a set of things that, as worthy as some may be, would wind up totally negating the purpose of the health portion of this legislation. Mr. President, this legislation has traveled, obviously, a very difficult road. But it is clear that the intent of a number of these amendments coming from the Republican side is calculated not to legitimately improve the bill, not to figure out, OK, which one of these cessation programs works the best? Do some States have a better model than others? If so, why don't we try to support those models more? Why don't we get more specific about diverting some of this money into a very specific set of counteradvertising efforts that we know work better? Some of those kinds of things might be very legitimate approaches to improving the bill. But to come in and say, no, we are going to take more than half of the money and just give it to the marriage penalty, and we are going to take some more money and give it to the Coast Guard and other antidrug efforts. Worthy as those may be, as I say, you wind up stripping away completely the capacity to do what a lot of States are struggling to do and what the health community of this country has advised us again and again is critical that we do if we are going to stop kids from smoking. That is what this bill is about. Somehow, a lot of colleagues seem prepared to simply trample on that. No one disputes the notion that somewhere in the vicinity of 3,000 kids, every single day, start smoking. No one has come to the floor and been able to dispute the testimony of the tobacco companies themselves who acknowledge that raising the price is a critical component of reducing the accessibility of cigarettes to teenagers. Nobody has any counterevidence to that. But they simply come down and try to pile on the notion that this bill is somehow too big. Mr. President, in the tobacco bill we have an expert designed approach to try to provide smoking cessation programs for 5 million Americans. That is an effort to try to give a second chance to some 5 million Americans. There are 45- to 50 million Americans who are hooked on cigarettes. How can you come down here and suggest you are going to take half the money that is directed towards 5 million of the 45- to 50 million Americans and say you are improving things with respect to the health of the country or with respect to young people's introduction to an addictive substance that kills them? There is a total contradiction here in coming down and saying what we have to do is stop cocaine and stop heroin, whatever substance you are trying to stop from coming in with interdiction by beefing up the Coast Guard or beefing up Customs, all of which we ought to do, but doing it at the expense of stopping kids already in this country from smoking cigarettes which are already in this country when we know we have the ability to stop them from doing that. I don't doubt the urgency the Senator from Georgia applies to the drug war. I have been the first to say we haven't been fighting it adequately, but I am not going to suggest that we ought to be robbing Peter to pay Paul, that we ought to be stealing from these kids in order to somehow beef up the Coast Guard. That doesn't make sense, particularly since cigarettes are the entryway to the very drugs that the Senator from Georgia wants to stop coming in. So let's find that money. But let's find it in an appropriate place without gutting the cessation, counter advertising and other kinds of efforts that are contained in here to try to stop our own children from smoking in our own country and from getting hold of the cigarettes that are manufactured here that are already here and that kill them here. What is the common sense in coming down here and stripping away all of that to suggest somehow--Do you know what this is? This is, ``Let's give the Senate a tough vote. Let's make it hard for people to vote against drug control, and we can strip away a little bit of the bill and strip away a little more.'' And indeed it will be overweighted in precisely the way the majority leader suggests because the entire guts of the bill will have been ripped out. That is what we are really talking about. Mr. President, it seems to me that hopefully colleagues will recognize that the crunch time is coming on whether or not we are going to try to find the bipartisan collegiality to try to legitimately improve this bill or whether people are just determined to kill it. If they kill it, it will be clear to every American why and how it happened and who did it. That is the choice here. If we want to legitimately restrain what some people on the other side think might be an aberration in terms of a particular choice of spending as to how you stop kids from smoking, then surely we can find a better way to help stop those kids from smoking. There is a clear distinction between the legitimate effort to try to do that and the efforts that we are seeing on the floor, which are to strip away all the funds altogether and put them into things that have nothing to do with stopping kids from smoking, nothing to do with helping kids to be able to build the character and the value system necessary to empower them to be able to say no to cigarettes. If you can't say no to cigarettes, you are going to have a real hard time saying no to the marijuana, or to the cocaine, or to whatever it is that might flow at a later date. These are directly related. My hope is that we will recognize the real choices of what lies in this legislation. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that there now be a period for the transaction of routine morning business with Senators permitted to speak for up to 10 minutes each.